TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

My Leaderboard Performs Well

For many months, the 728×90 leaderboard displayed at the top of my blog remained unsold. My advertise page is clearly displayed and available, and I even mentioned several times that my leaderboard was available. But for whatever reason, nobody seems interested in.

Two weeks ago, however, Lee Bandoni from GetMeContent.com decided to grab it to see how well it performed. I had never closely analyzed how well the leaderboard was doing with my PublisherSpot banner, but I did see a steady stream of referral traffic to PublisherSpot from my blog. However, since I didn’t have any tracking set up, it was hard to tell which traffic was coming from the leaderboard and which was coming from links in my posts.

About an hour ago I decided to check in with Lee to see how it was performing for him. Lee has advertised with me before through a paid review and so I wanted to make sure he was happy with everything.

While Lee also doesn’t have any tracking set up, he has his staff ask new customers and clients directly how they found the site. Just halfway into his one-month trial run with my 728×90 banner, Lee has already received 3-4 conversions.

The main packages at GetMeContent.com sell for $99, $250, and $999, so I’m going to estimate that he received around $600 in orders thus far as a result of his leaderboard on my blog. Also factor in that one of those customers might come back to him in the future as a repeat customer, and/or tell his friends.

And Lee still has close to 2-weeks left on his campaign. Hopefully more conversions will come in and he’ll make at least $1,000 in orders by the end of his campaign.

Another benefit of advertising in premium locations is branding and awareness. I often preach the value of branding and awareness, but I can understand how not everybody values it as much as I do. I believe that in the long term though that branding is extremely valuable.

Think Coca-Cola. Since their beginning back in the late 19th century I think it was, they’ve always had a very aggressive branding campaign. I’m not going to try to compare Coca-Cola’s huge success to the benefit of advertising on my blog, but I think it’s fair to point out that advertisers have to also think about long-term effects and not just short-term direct conversions.

If you’re looking for content for your site in the future, you might remember that there was some site advertised on my blog.. you probably won’t be able to remember the URL or even the exact company name, but you do know that there was something, and you may come back to my blog to check it out again. Or, you may happen across them one-year from now and remember “Hey, I saw this site before… must be fairly decent…”.

Anyhow, enough branding talk. My leaderboard banner is performing very well for Lee, and it is displayed sitewide with no rotation. How much do you think it costs per month? $400? $250 (Wow, I sound like some cheesy infomercial guy, heh)?

No, it was only $75 a month. I’m surprised that nobody wanted to grab a banner on a blog with a very targeted and focused audience of webmasters, publishers, and entrepreneurs who aren’t afraid to buy/use services and products. I don’t get all that much traffic, just 15,000 uniques a month, but for $75 I think it’s a bargain.

Anyhow, for those wanting to grab the leaderboard banner now, it’s too late 🙂 Lee is happy with it and will be renewing his campaign when it ends.

I’ve increased the price by only $5 to $80 a month. If you’d like to get on the waiting list for it, let me know.

Now, can anybody tell me a good plugin or method that will let me add it to the top of my RSS feed? With an RSS subscribership of 800, if I could put the leaderboard into RSS it would make it twice as valuable. I’d really appreciate if somebody could tell me how to do this as I tried looking how to do it a while ago but couldn’t figure out how.

Thanks!

P.S. I might install OpenAds and run the leaderboard on there so I can track the exact amount traffic my leaderboards are sending out.